Violation causes from the perspectives of managers and workers in Chinese railway systems: An exploratory study

The objective of this study was to understand violation causes by Chinese railway workers, and how safety culture and personal cultural values influence their violations. We conducted a survey to investigate violation causes, perceived violation risk, violation frequency, and personal cultural values of Chinese railway workers and the safety culture of the Chinese railway system. The survey was completed by 150 railway employees (including workers and managers), from two province capital railway stations. We found that managers mainly attribute workers' violations to saving time and energy and increasing ease, whereas they do not realize the incorrectness, impracticality, and risk of safety rules and the influence of adverse conditions and strict supervision on violations. In addition, managers perceived lower risk on all types of violations than railway workers did, especially on exceptional and optimizing violations. They believed that approaches to decreasing optimizing violations primarily involved enhancing enforcement and strengthening supervision. However, these approaches tend to be unreasonable choices for workers. From the perspective of personal cultural values, workers who rate highly in uncertainty avoidance tend to commit more routine violations, situational violations, and optimizing violations than their counterparts. Workers who rate highly in shared emotions tend to commit more routine violations than their counterparts do. No significant correlations were found between violation frequency and perceived risk by Chinese railway workers.